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Updated: Oct 9, 2025

Evaluation of Caspase Activation to Assess Innate Immune Cell Death
Published on: January 20, 2023
TALE-induced cell death executors: an origin outside immunity?
Moritz K Nowack1, Danalyn R Holmes2, Thomas Lahaye2
1Department of Plant Biotechnology and Bioinformatics, Ghent University, 9052 Ghent, Belgium; VIB Center of Plant Systems Biology, 9052 Ghent, Belgium.
Abstract:
Phytopathogenic bacteria inject effector proteins into plant host cells to promote disease. Plant resistance (R) genes encoding nucleotide-binding leucine-rich repeat (NLR) proteins mediate the recognition of functionally and structurally diverse microbial effectors, including transcription-activator like effectors (TALEs) from the bacterial genus Xanthomonas. TALEs bind to plant promoters and transcriptionally activate either disease-promoting host susceptibility (S) genes or cell death-inducing executor-type R genes. It is perplexing that plants contain TALE-perceiving executor-type R genes in addition to NLRs that also mediate the recognition of TALE-containing xanthomonads. We present recent findings on the evolvability of TALEs, which suggest that the native function of executors is not in plant immunity, but possibly in the regulation of developmentally controlled programmed cell death (PCD) processes.
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